MDMC ‘17 Opening Night Party at Momentum - Interview with SVP/Dir of Strategy & Insights, NA Elena Klau

In Your Business with UMSL | Business

"Press Start to Continue" at Momentum Worldwide Opening Party for MDMC 2017. Momentum worldwide is a total brand experience agency that sets out to make the industry's most disruptive, entertaining, sharable, indelible experiences for our clients. 'In Your Business' interviews leadership of Momentum WW for insights to business, leadership, and their newly released paper "We Know Gamers" as part of their "We Know" leadership series.

Produced By: Hal Deane, Sean Gabris, Marc Wanninger, Jerry Strutynski, Chanti Harris-Walker and Curtis Hoffman.

Host: Hal Deane

Guest: Senior Vice President/Director of Strategy & Insights, North America Elena Klau

About MDMC: In 2013, the State of Digital Media Marketing Conference was born at the campus of the University of Missouri – St. Louis. The first was a half day event featuring prominent speakers mostly via Google Hangouts held at the J.C. Penney Conference Center at UMSL. The conference grew to a full-day in 2014, taking up all of the conference center, and by 2015, it was obvious the venue was too small as sessions, the exhibit hall and keynote were packed. Then in 2016, the event took over St. Louis Union Station, nearly doubling the capacity and attendance along with it. The conference also took on a rebrand, now known as the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference, or MDMC for short. Last year MDMC set attendance records with a remarkable 1,367 marketers and friends, not to mention 300 wait listed persons. We trended on twitter both nationally, and internationally for 8 hours. The event hit a record this year of about 1,465 attendees. About Momentum Worldwide: People are no longer satisfied with simply "hearing" a brand's message. Now it's the actual experiences we have with a brand that define its relevance—emotionally, socially and when it's time to buy. It's a big change. Advertising used to be pretty straightforward: catchy tagline, killer track, creative media plan ..."let's do lunch." Those days are over. But what's next is even more exciting.

Brands still need to connect with people to build stronger reputations and sell products. But now people demand more from brands than just the product or service. They need these connections to have meaning. Our focus, our passion, and the reason we love our work is because we help brands imagine, create, curate and manage their Total Brand Experience. Our job is to create meaning and connections for our clients and their brands. And in today's world, where people demand corporate transparency and increased sustainability, this approach—redefining all the ways people experience a brand in action—is more important than ever.

We built our agency to be the largest, best Total Brand Experience agency in the world. We do this as one global agency on six continents with more than 40 offices around the world—all of us working together, eager to invent, challenge the status quo, and above all, show the real business value of action over words. Because the same guiding principle rings true for our employees as it does for our clients: it’s not what you say, it's what you do that matters.